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Meet the Beetle

If I asked you to name the best horror novel of 1897, you
would probably reply, 'Why, Dracula of course.' But I disagree. I would say -
and I know I’m not alone in my opinion - 'Ah, that would be The Beetle: A
Mystery by Richard Marsh. It’s a corker, ain’t it?' In fact 1897 was a pretty
good year for literature. HG Wells published The Invisible Man, Rudyard Kipling
gave the world Captains Courageous, and of course, Mr B Stoker wrote The
Un-Dead, a title swiftly changed just before it hit the printing presses.
Stoker’s work was a best-seller, arguably the first modern horror novel, but
just a few months later came along something that went one better. 'Mr Bram
Stoker gave us a sufficiently blood-curdling tale recently of a vampire-man,
who crawled up and down walls and swarmed in and out the chambers of innocent
Englishwomen as a bat,' wrote the literary critic of the Glasgow Herald. 'That
was an effort of the imagination not easy to beat. But Mr Richard Marsh has, so
to speak, out-Heroded Herod.'

The Beetle is a thrilling, weird adventure about a
politician named Paul Lessingham who hides a dark secret. As a young man, he
was kidnapped in Egypt and held prisoner by a beetle-worshipping cult, from
whom he eventually escaped. Now a representative of that cult has travelled to
London, seeking revenge. Lessingham is affianced to Marjorie Lindon (whose
father sits across the House), much to the envious frustration of her childhood
pal, gentleman scientist Sydney Atherton. Using a psychically-controlled
homeless man, Robert Holt, to do all the dirty work, the Beetle kidnaps Miss
Lindon. Atherton and Lessingham must overcome their differences and work
together to rescue her, assisted by a ‘confidential agent’ (private detective)
named the Hon. Augustus Champnell.

The Beetle him/her/itself is an extraordinary creation, at
times masculine or feminine, young or old, beautiful or hideous - and capable
of transmogrifying into an enormous scarab beetle. The novel describes this
fiend as having yellow skin, thick lips and a large nose, thereby combining the
stereotypical characteristics of Victorian England’s three most feared races:
the Chinaman, the Negro and the Jew. In an era when anyone living further away
than Calais was considered a filthy foreigner, such equating of non-white
characteristics with evil was perfectly acceptable.

A rollicking crime drama spiced up with the supernatural
terror of the title character, Marsh’s novel is told in four sections (by,
respectively: Holt, Miss Lindon, Atherton and Champnell) and climaxes with an
exciting chase between two steam locomotives. Yet while Dracula is an
established classic, The Beetle remains the province of dedicated fans of
Victorian gothic. It’s not necessarily that Stoker’s book is better. In fact, being
completely honest, Dracula the novel is a bit of a pot-boiler and something of
a let-down when finally read after years of watching Lee, Lugosi, Langella and
Louis Jourdan. While The Beetle’s four-part structure can seem unwieldy to 21st
century readers, Stoker’s narrative is a barely readable hotch-potch of
diaries, journals, letters and memos, sometimes switching narrator after each
paragraph.

Richard Marsh’s real name was Richard Bernard Heldmann and, as Bernard Heldmann, he published a handful of novels and some magazine serials
in the early 1880s before disappearing for five years. Until recently, these
wilderness years were as much a mystery as The Beetle itself. In fact we only
know that Marsh and Heldmann were the same person because of information in the
autobiography of his grandson, prolific horror short story scribe Robert
Aickman. Recent research has revealed that Heldmann built up a number of large
debts under several aliases before being arrested and sentenced to 18 months.
On his release, he adopted his mother’s maiden name and became Richard Marsh.

Where Heldmann had concentrated on rite-of-passage tales of
lads at school, Marsh’s work took a turn for the fantastical, starting with his
1893 novel The Devil’s Diamond, in which a magical gem is guarded by a
multicoloured ape, and a man receives a warning from his brother’s ghost. This
was followed by The Mahatma’s Pupil (a Cockney magician, who has learned magic
in the East, creates bad luck for his hosts) and The Strange Wooing of Mary Bowler (a murderer is driven mad with guilt when actors present a reconstruction of
his crime). Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these books - no-one has.

Marsh was a jobbing author but it was The Beetle which made
his fortune and for all his subsequent books (there were a lot: several titles
each year right up to 1920), he would be billed as ‘author of The Beetle’. The
story was first published in weekly parts from March to June 1897, under the
cumbersome title The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man. On the 25th of September that year, the retitled yarn was released by Skeffington and Son,
a company more commonly associated with religious tomes. The publisher billed
it as 'one of the most weird, startling, and original stories of modern times' - and the critics were knocked for six.

'The Beetle revels in the weird,' said the Daily Graphic. 'It is a book to be read - not maybe when alone or just before going to bed,
because it is the kind of book you put down only for the purpose of turning up
the gas and making sure that no person or thing is standing behind your chair -
and it is a book which no-one will put down until finished except for the
reason described above.'

'The beetle in question is not one of the common black
kitchen variety,' wrote the critic of the Pall Mall Gazette, 'but a child of
Isis, either her priest or priestess - no one (not even the author) knows
which... It is the kind of story you must finish once you have begun, and the
frontispiece is weird enough to make you want to begin.' (The frontispiece and
three other interior illustrations were drawn by John Williamson, about whom I
can find no concrete biographical information.)

The Glasgow Herald’s reviewer, coiner of the term
‘out-Heroded’, agreed with both the other gentlemen about the book’s
unputdownability: 'This is a tale of modern life in London, which, on the
perusal of the first few pages, suggests that it was written by a lunatic for
lunatics. But that impression soon goes away... The Beetle is one of those "creepy-crawly" stories like The Moonstone, which it is difficult, if not
impossible, to lay down when once begun.' Other critics were similarly
effusive: 'A story of the most terrific kind is duly recorded in this extremely
powerful book. The skill with which its fantastic horrors are presented to us
is undeniable.' (The Speaker); 'This surprising and ingenious story succeeds in
producing that sensation of horror which should make the flesh of even the
least susceptible reader creep.' (The Academy); 'An ingenious, weird, and
thrilling story, narrated with a clearness of style and a fulness of incident,
which holds the reader’s attention from first to last.' (The Literary World).

The reading public too were taken with this new book. The
Beetle was reprinted three times in 1897 and by 1913 had reached its 15th
edition (Dracula had only managed ten). It continued to sell well throughout
the 1920s and indeed stayed in print continuously until 1960, after which it
was sporadically reprinted every few years. So why has it become forgotten? Why
has Stoker’s work overtaken it as the definitive fin-de-siecle Victorian
supernatural shocker? Partly the answer lies in the central character. Count
Dracula is much more active than the Beetle, who mostly lies in bed and sends
psychic commands to the mesmerised Holt. The Count insinuates himself into
polite society, disguising his evil nature and intent. Dracula is very much a
book about a character - and the malleability of that character has allowed him
to escape from the multiple adaptations and take on a life of his own. The
Beetle on the other hand is an adventure story: it’s very difficult to see what
else the eponymous villain might get up to.

The key word above is ‘adaptations’. Dracula transferred to
the stage, and then to film - and more films and TV and radio and still more
films, carrying the novel’s reputation in their wake. The Beetle was only
adapted once, in 1919, by the Barker Motion Photography Company. James Hebden
Foster, an acclaimed opera singer who had started out as a choirboy in the
Chapel Royal at Windsor, starred in this silent feature as Lessingham, with
Fred Morgan as the Beetle, given the name ‘Neces’ in this version. Alexander
Butler directed from a scenario by Helen Blizzard. Sadly, not even a still
survives from this lost film.

And that, I thought, was that. But my research for this Blog
turned up a largely unknown stage play of The Beetle which opened at the Strand
Theatre (now the Novello) in October 1928 after a provincial tour. This
adaptation by James B Fagan was first announced in January 1924, shortly before
Hamilton Deane’s version of Dracula opened in London. The play was originally
set to star Dennis Eadie (remembered today for his 1916 biopic of Disraeli) but
he died in June and the part was recast to Frank Royde, a tall, imposing actor
whose career stretched into the 1960s. Also in the cast were Helena Pickard,
recently married to (Sir) Cedric Hardwicke, and Catherine Lacey, whose later career
included The Mummy’s Shroud and The Sorcerers.

And there our tale almost ends - except, wait, what’s this?
It’s a Screen International news story in February 2005 stating that Hammer
Films were developing an adaptation of The Beetle. Could this be true? Well,
erm, not really. I know - because that adaptation of The Beetle was written by
me. Here, for any future film historians planning articles on ‘unmade Hammer
projects’, is the story behind Hammer’s The Beetle. The 90-minute script was
written in 2002 as part of a Masters Degree in Scriptwriting which I took at De
Montfort University. I was fairly liberal with my adaptation: out went Marjorie
Lindon’s father, in came a ‘silly arse’ comic foil for Atherton who otherwise
would have had no way to externalise most of his thoughts. The climax was
switched to a chase along the carriages of a single steam train, and the whole
narrative was given a framing story set during World War One, with an
oh-so-subtle twist right at the end. I was pretty pleased with my work.

One of my tutors was a leading agent who knew the then
owners of Hammer Films. This was after Graham Skeggs sold up but before Dutch Big Brother bloke bought the company. In the mid-noughties Hammer existed as a
company and announced a number of co-productions, but never actually made
anything. The Screen International story was actually about Random Harvest
Films, the studio behind two British horror turkeys: LD50 and Octane. Five
titles were described as being "in advanced development”: The Cottage, Drowning,
Earth Requiem (co-production with Stan Winston Productions), Perfect Sight and The Beetle (both co-productions with Hammer). Of those, just one got made: The
Cottage, a very funny and under-rated horror comedy, although it wasn’t made by
Random Harvest.

Both the Hammer CEO and myself were surprised to read all
this because, although we had discussed The Beetle - which he liked - my script
had not been formally optioned and was certainly not in development. It looks
like an over-zealous Screen International reporter had sneaked a pre-interview
peak at what was on the guy’s desk and jumped to their own conclusions. The
story was picked up by various fansites and even the Guardian, but alas, it’s
not true. I wish I could say that I wrote Hammer’s unproduced version of
Richard Marsh’s novel, but even I’m not that full of BS. Could it still happen?
Well, I don’t have an ‘in’ with the current version of Hammer and it’s unlikely
they’d be over-keen to work with me after what I wrote about the disappointing The Woman in Black. But my script is still here so if anyone out there wants to
film a lost Victorian classic, you know where to find me.

(If you’re in West Sussex, an exhibition about Richard Marsh
is at Crawley Library until the 9th of August.)

MJ Simpson has been writing since he
found out which end of a pencil makes a mark. After editing sci-fan
club mags he spent three years on the staff of SFX and helped to launch
Total Film before switching to freelance work for Fangoria, Shivers,
Video Watchdog, DeathRay and other cult movie magazines. He
has a number of scripts in development and has been working on his
third book, a biography of 'Bride of Frankenstein' Elsa Lanchester, for a very long time, but he
promises to have it finished soon (-ish). Mike lives in Leicester
with his wife, Mrs S, and his young son, TF Simpson. By day he edits
the university's website and in the evenings he edits MJSimpson.co.uk.
He should probably get out more.